My Lenten Participation 2018

My Lenten Participation Plans 2018

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I have no great expectations for Lent this year. Maybe my expected struggles this year can be a good place from which to encourage other persons hesitantly hoping to participate in Lent this year for one more time, or for the first time.

            In my mind, this year’s Lenten Season can hardly come at a worse time. I have been struggling with feeling under the weather. I have household equipment needing replaced, and I am dealing with a number of inadequacies regarding how I manage life. Lent would often be a time to face some of these difficulties, but instead this year’s Lenten Season coincides with major maintenance work on my job. Instead of a normal work schedule, I will be working twelve hour days, six days a week. Instead of imagining the Lenten Season as a time of planting spiritual seed, I am simply hoping to survive a likely barren season. But maybe that is one way to enter the wilderness with our Lord. I am moved in my time of low expectations for this Lenten Season to encourage others to use this Lenten Season to hear the Lord calling you to join him in this season when we consider life in the wilderness, and set our hearts to go to Jerusalem with our Lord, to face wilderness sufferings, to seek repentance and growth in grace to journey with the Lord onwards to joining him in death, burial, and resurrection. I hope a few words might serve you in your endeavors to join Jesus on the road to Good Friday and the day of Resurrection on Easter Sunday during this Lenten Season.

            First remember the paradox of a spiritual life. I often think of how Malcolm Muggeridge once described the paradox of our spiritual journeys. He spoke of the spiritual life being illustrated by a medieval era Gothic cathedral. Think of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The church has a great spire pointing from the earth to the heavens. In our desires to live out a spiritual life we imagine ourselves giving our lives to heaven, of being transported spiritually into wonderful rapturous heights through growth in the Holy Spirit. We imagine a holy life to move upwards to the heights like a spire.

 

We imagine our lives being lifted spiritually like a spire into the heavens

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                        Yet we are men and women whose feet can only leap a few inches off the ground. Muggeridge described how the roof of the great Gothic cathedral had the creatures in the form of the gargoyles humorously seeing the spectacle of our nearly vain spiritual aspirations.

 

How humorous our aspirations seem to the creatures looking upon us!

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            Of course, that is not the full story but it is part of the story isn’t it? Our spiritual aspirations begin with great expectations, meet such unfulfilled frustrations, but we are actually headed towards Jerusalem, towards suffering with Christ, dying with him on the cross, buried with him, and then ultimately to be risen with Him. Our venture so fraught with struggle and failure is destined for resurrection and glory and eternal life.

            All of this is part of the experience of Lent. If you imagine that passing through Lent you will reach a spiritual high, you will likely be deeply disappointed. But if you imagine yourself entering the wilderness with Jesus, where only Jesus stood all the great tests, you will find your weakness, your flaws, your struggle, but alas you will find all this out with Him in the Wilderness. You will discover that you can never know enough, or be enough, but that you are fully known by Him, who is enough.

            The Lenten Season is not meant to be a season to be experienced apart from other seasons in a church year. There is an order in the seasons of the spiritual year, just as there is an order in the seasons of the year. At the end of one year we experience darkness, and then the days grow longer and winter gives way to spring and we plant our gardens, and in the summer the sun gives growth and come fall as the days grow shorter we reap a harvest to feed us through the darkness of winter.

            In the Christian year, we begin in the darkness of the Advent season. In darkness, we wait for the Christ to come to rescue us from the darkness of sin. At Christmas we celebrate God’s entrance into our humanity. Then we experience the season of Epiphany. God manifests Christ’s true nature to us through signs and wonders. We realize who he truly is; Lord, Savior, Physician, and Redeemer. All of this has happened before we are called to participate in Lent.

            Do you understand what I am saying? Lent is the season of planting. The Light has come into the world, and we see the earth ready to spring to new life. Jesus has reached into our lives during Epiphany and we have seen Him as the one who is the way, the truth, and the life. Lent is the season when He turns toward us. He has shown us who he is. Now He says to us, “Come with me.” Now he says to us, “I am entering the wilderness. I am headed towards Jerusalem. I am going to a cross. On the third day I will rise from the dead and those who believe in me will not die but will have eternal life.” He says to us between Epiphany and Good Friday, “Come with me.” That is the meaning of Lent. Of course it means repentance, suffering, testing, and sacrifice. But it means this is all to be as ones joined to him.

            I don’t have special plans to give up much stuff for this Lenten Season which will be spent mostly at work. But I do hope to spend a significant amount of my few hours of free time reading the Psalms, reading the Gospels and asking Him to help me know his presence in the wilderness during this Lenten Season. I suspect that during this Lenten season you will have time in the wilderness, and hopefully the Lord will show you how to find that in your Wilderness travels that He is already there and that it is He who has called you to join him there.